Counting and Classification of Malarial Parasite From Giemsa-Stained Thin Film Images

Malaria is a life-threatening disease causing by an infection of the protozoan parasite Plasmodium. Plasmodium falciparum is the deadliest and most common human infected parasites hosted by anopheles mosquito vector. To cure a malaria infected patient and prevent further spreading, malaria diagnosis using microscopy to visualize Giemsa-stained parasites is commonly done. The microscopy diagnosis is somewhat time consuming and requires well-trained malaria experts to interpret what they see under the microscope. To address this limitation, an automated malaria infected diagnosis is needed. This work proposed a computer-aided automated diagnosis system that can perform remote field diagnosis with high accuracy while requiring less computational demands. The proposed framework consists of two main parts that are red blood cell counting and parasite life-cycle stage classification. The counting process is performed by computer vision techniques, namely Hough transform. Different machine learning techniques, i.e., Multilayer Perceptron, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machine, and Weighted Similarity Extreme Learning Machine, are employed in the classification task. We also demonstrated that combining hand-crafted and deep-learned features can enhance the overall performance of the framework. The experimental results showed that the proposed methods could correctly count and classify at 97.94% and 98.12% accuracy, respectively. The overall proposal system can achieve at 96.18% accuracy. This is achieved by WELM in conjunction with deep-learned (AlexNet_FC7) and the hand-crafted (color) features.